On Tue, May 5, 2015 at 9:54 AM, Simon Kenyon simon@koala.ie wrote:
On 05/02/15 08:51, gacuest@gmail.com wrote:
I have seen that are developing several EOMA-68, but all have very little power or are old (like A20, JZ4775 or IC1T). This makes that many people that are looking for powerful hardware is left out of the EOMA-68 market.
What is the future of EOMA-68? Any EOMA-68 with a powerful hardware (like Tegra X1 or Intel Bay-Trail)?
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this is NOT a troll
understood and accepted. you're asking hard questions, and that's appreciated.
i think it was sometime in 2011 that the eoma-68 concept was defined.
i do realise that luke and others have put a lot of effort into this but it has been a very long time and i still can't buy anything
is it not time to reevaluate the project, its goals and objectives?
i'm tempted to say that a decade-long project by definition doesn't need its goals and objectives to be re-evaluated, however this hasn't been the case.
the first - key - mistake made was to add SATA to EOMA68, not just because the allwinner A10 had it, but also because the idea was, at the time, to make EOMA68 more of a "computer" standard. part-server, part-desktop, part-embedded, part-portable device and so on.
then as the market in low-cost SoCs progressed, and more were evaluated - Texas Instruments AM Sitara beaglebone/black SoCs, Ingenic SoCs, Allwinner's "tablet" specialised SoCs, Rockchip SoCs - it was noted that *absolutely none of them* had SATA, and even fewer had Ethernet.
so given that the cost of the SoCs, some of them, are as low as $USD 2.00 (literally $2.00 - as in $2 and zero cents) if you have to add a USB Hub IC ($1) and a USB-to-SATA IC ($1.50) it *entirely* defeats the object of the exercise in putting down the low-cost $USD 2 SoC in the first place.
so... SATA had to go. that was the first specification change.
then, somewhere along the lines - about 2 years ago - joe and henrik kindly had a discussion about UART and TTL voltage reference levels. i still to this day don't quite see why just a simple zener diode won't do the job (henrik "Gets It") but hey, rather than have the argument, i decided it was safer to change the spec... again... rather than have it fail BEFORE IT EVEN STARTED...
... and replaced one of the 4 0.5A 5V *input* pins with a "TTL ref voltage" *OUTPUT* pin.
then i realised that, actually, many people who'd said "what about SD/MMC" and "what about SPI" and "what about UART" were actually right, so i made *ANOTHER* change to the spec, this time:
* reducing the RGB/TTL from 24 to 18 pins (freeing up 3 pins) * putting in SPI in place of the RGB/TTL pins removed * replacing SATA (4 pin) with USB2 (2 pin) leaving 2 further pins free * one of those was turned into a PWM * the other was turned into a 2nd EINT (IRQ-capable) GPIO.
so now we have something that's, instead of being "general computer", "general server", "general desktop", is more "embedded devices", "portable devices"...
... but how long did it take - and how much money - to make these decisions?
*four years*, simon, and it's cost so far around $USD 25,000 possibly as much as $USD 30,000. which is a hell of a lot of money to spend as a learning experience on something as "simple" as a standard.
so the short answer is, i've done a *hell* of a lot of thinking, and am *constantly* re-evaluating the project, its goals and objectives, and, fortunately, each time i do that, the answer comes up "yep it's on track".
the one thing i do have to do is take a deep breath and commit to this first crowd-funding campaign. i'm... not hugely happy that the cost of USA-based manufacturing is a whopping $25 per product extra ($12 for assembly of the micro-desktop instead of $3, $12 for assembly of the eoma68-a20 pcb instead of $3, and $5 for the PCBs themselves instead of $1.50 but to be fair the contract manufacturer has amortised the $1,000 laser-cut steel mask for solder pasting into the quote)
but, thinking about it over the past couple of days, i figured "well, if that's the cost then that's the cost", and we go ahead anyway.
l.